| Frank Stella (Photos courtesy Toledo Museum of Art-Andrew Weber) |
Here he is, Frank Stella, the artist whose place in art history books is secure, with his wiry frame
comfortably ensconced in an easy chair in the Canaday Gallery at the Toledo Museum of Art.
Around him are perched, less comfortably members of the local media.
Stella’s creviced and bespectacled face is framed by one of his oddly angular and boldly colored
paintings, one of his Irregular Polygon series that hangs in the background.
Eleven of those paintings are now on display at the museum, where they’ll stay through July 24.
Stella demonstrates his sometime prickly nature that earned him a reputation as an iconoclast in the art
world. He’s quick to correct a date, in Museum Director Brian Kennedy’s opening remarks.
And when a reporter talks about his making art because it makes him happy in the heart he mutters:
"I have to pay the bills."
Making art is "about how you think about pictorial problems," he said at the media event last
Thursday. "Pictorial problems, that’s what painters think about."
"What you see is what you see," he famously said in the past. And he became a painter because
he realized he was good at the game and could play it. His early work now sells for millions.
| Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons in the Toledo Museum of Art’s Canaday Gallery |
Referring to the heyday of American abstract painting in the 1950s and 1960s, he said, yes, it was
exciting. The first time American art became the measure, when New York rivaled Paris as the center of
the art world.
"These were people without any weight or power, average downtown artists who were able to project
themselves in a way that made a difference," changing the way people saw art and the world round
them.
It was a time when a painter was on the cover of Life Magazine "even if it was Jack the
Dripper," Stella said, a reference to Jackson Pollock whose paintings with thick swirls of impasto
applied in splashes defined the style Abstract Expression. Stella’s work was a strong reaction to that.
Intellectual, highly structured, and every bit as original.
Asked about the activity center for children in the middle of the gallery, he says, "10 years ago I
would have been out the window" over what he would have seen as an intrusion into the gallery.
Still, he accepts it now, maybe because of his "second wave of children."
"In the end it doesn’t make much difference." Then he asks Kennedy to explain.
Yes, the museum director says, Stella has told him that he believes a museum is where artists view other
artists work.
But a museum needs to find a way to reach out to its broader community, Kennedy said, and find ways to
engage and educate them. The arrangement in the Canaday he notes still leaves an expanse of space for
the viewer to study the art.
Stella’s paintings use a basic visual alphabet, Kennedy said. The activities will are intended to teach
children about Stella’s use of geometric shapes and color, and give them a chance to try their own hand
at solving pictorial puzzles.
The assembled representatives of the media don’t do so well when Stella quizzes them about the painting
Chocorua IV. Which color came first? One by one, reluctant answers come – yellow, red, grey, leaving
only the right answer, green.
Stella said that deciding on the colors is easy. In this case, the green is in the most dominant area,
the equivalent of the field in a landscape.
| Frank Stella discusses pictorial problems at an evening talk last week at the Toledo Museum of Art. |
Once he decided that would be green, the others were reactions to that.
In the Irregular Polygons series, Stella created 11 different designs, and then did four differently
colored representations of each.
Kennedy, who curated the exhibit, said that once Stella created these canvases people wondered: "Why
did it take thousands of years?"
Kennedy first assembled the show for Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, where Stella was teaching when
he first conceived the series.
Each of the paintings is named after a New Hampshire town that Stella, a native of Massachusetts,
remembers from summering in the state.
This is the first time examples of all 11 shapes have been exhibited together.
Stella said he felt "pretty lucky" to have his art in Toledo. If he was to react as a New
Yorker, that is a "know nothing," he may qualify his praise with the adjective
"provincial." But he would have none of that, "It’s a fantastic museum."
Its collection represents a range of great Western art and makes it available to the community.
"How many free museums are left that will provide work of this quality?" he said. "It’s a
wonderful museum."
